Do you really want to see .com change to .gov down the road? That's the direction we're headed for if we don't put a stop to governmental intrusions into the market. I don't have a thing for MSFT or Bill Gates, per se, it's the big picture of what this farce all stands for and the road ahead that concerns me.
Not to belabor this, I'm not much into hanging around hostile forums anymore <VBG>, but this again seems a bit hyperbolic. Many companies have come under antitrust scrutiny before without the world collapsing into communism because of it. Just to take the obvious example of the unindicted sometimes co-conspirator, Intel managed to negotiate its way out of its investigation without, apparently, limiting its ability to strongarm other companies in the PC supply chain. Try to find a mention of the K7M on the ASUS web site. Of course, Intel does suffer from something approaching competition these days, whereas the only way to compete with Microsoft seems to be with a different kind of "free". Which, in turn, leads to some head-scratching on the conceptual capitalism front.
On which subject, perhaps sometime you'd like to engage a certain lawyer on another thread. He seemed to have gone pretty libertarian the last time we got much into antitrust theory. Still seemed somewhat hostile to Microsoft, though. I admit to being more impressed by citations of Hayek than of that well-known novelist, but I don't imagine John Galt's skyscrapers crashed very often either. I tried to direct Gerald over to the Libertarian thread at the time, but like me his interests on SI seem circumscribed.
Anyway, political philosophy seems to me to be about as distant from operational law, government, and politics these days as, well, maybe, theoretical quantum mechanics is from semiconductor manufacturing. It has some bearing, but nobody goes around solving the Schroedinger equation for microprocessors.
Cheers, Dan, outa here for now. |
